Tinkering

Tinkering. One of those lovely, evocative words which seems to have a whiff of quaintness about it.

In a Google+ post today, in the comment stream for this article, someone used it and made an interesting remark. Regarding the whole “messing around with computers” meme, he made the point that “our parents” tinkered around with […]

VIA – Hot stuff!

A while back I wrote a few notes on building a small home server box. Specifically that I had chosen this neat Morex case and this VIA EK Corefusion motherboard.Here in southern Europe the summer has been in full swing, and it got hotter by the day. A few weekends back I thought I’d […]

Building a home server – Software

Install the Operating System

As detailed in the Introduction, we’re going to drop a standard install of Ubuntu Server Edition on here, and then customise for various additional functionality.

The first step, of course, is to obtain one Ubuntu install CD! Go to the download page for Ubuntu, then make sure you select the server […]

Building a home server – hardware assembly

How easy is this going to be?

Worried? Don’t be. It may be fair to say that if you’ve never taken the cover off a computer in your life then this maybe isn’t the ideal starting point. But if you’ve ever dabbled a bit, maybe adding memory or changing a hard disk on a desktop […]

Building a home server

Here we look at building a cheap, quiet and compact home media server.So what is a “home-media server”? Different things to different folks, but the box I’m going to build is actually to replace an existing unit which works fine but is too large and much too noisy.

What is a home server?

Like many […]

Pinnacle Showcenter 1000

Media servers for Pinnacle Showcenter 1000

I’ve had a Pinnacle Showcenter 1000 for a while now. It was one of the first “simple client – smart server” devices around, and is still a great device for getting music, photos and video from a PC to a hi-fi stack and TV.

The Showcenter itself is […]